Story: "Sing Us A Song"

[indybaggins.livejournal.com]

Author: Indy Baggins
Title: Sing us a song
Pairing: Wayne, a very small hint of Colin/Ryan
Rating: PG
Summary: An attempt to song write on a late rainy night brings out memories… Set today, in 2006.
Author’s comments: Written for Lyndsey, because she’s nice and therefore should get lots of little fic-presents *laughs* Also, thanks to Clay for beta-duty.




Sing us a song


When he tries to think back to the Whose Line days, to relive the feeling of it, his head swarms in seven hundred layers of hope and desperation at the present, and he bites down on the black pen in his hand.

“Don’t try to catch the past” he writes down in a small, spidery handwriting, and it sounds phoney even to his own ears, in the middle of the night, with rain ticking on the outside windows.

All he has done lately is try to find beauty in a world that seems to have too much and yet too little of it.

He longs for the days back when, the days that give him images of genuine smiles when he tries to bring them back and place words in his mind such as “friendship” and “real,” and he wonders if it ever was or if he was just naïve in thinking so.

Six years since he’d been on the Whose Line set, humping Drew’s desk, winking to Laura before starting his songs, and he’d felt like he deserved it at the time, as if he had worked hard enough and that it was his reward. When he’d left, he thought the rest of his life would be like that. Being accepted, being entertained, appreciated even.

It hadn’t been.

Six years of fake smiles and back-stabbing colleagues and relative popularity had done something to him; it had changed him.

“Hollowed” is what he writes down, and he means it.

He thinks back to when he had Ryan next to him on stage, his quiet strength a steady comfort. He thinks about Drew and the warm and gentle spread of heat his teasing had always brought to him. He thinks about Colin, who would hold him and hug him and treat him as he was outright special.

He thinks about Greg too, who never shied away from a racist joke or from some condescending truth, and he realised he had enjoyed it-the feeling of being surrounded, of being one of the group, of being both dragged down in the fall and caught before it could come that far.

After “hollowed” follows “our routine, I should have loved it, simply because it was ours, but I never stopped to think so”, and he thinks it too cliché not to strike out viciously, black scratched lines on a white paper on the middle of the barely lit kitchen table.

They surrounded him in a warm web of smiles, reassuring ones, cocky ones, and he had felt so at ease, so deep down right with where he was, that now the feeling was almost unbelievable to imagine.

He’d seen Colin, only a couple months ago. Asked him if he missed it too. Colin had, along with the ones of his son and wife, shown him a picture of a visibly aged Ryan, and had smiled just a bit.

He writes down something about “empty eyes” and can’t help not to think about Colin and the pictures in his hands that had said what he hadn’t.

Everything that fitted so perfectly and unspoken on their little stage had proved too brittle for the real world, and that thought hits him right in the stomach. They all went on, all went on to string years between them by adding day after day to their lives of indecision, and he decides not even to pretend he doesn’t know it the next time he sees any of them.

Then again, when would he see them?

He almost thinks about going back to bed, but then he doesn’t, watching the drops of rain listlessly tapping on the window, and he slowly hums the hoedown tune, making it sound almost sad.

They lost a lot, he knows. But at least he was there; at least they felt it once, at least he remembers. He remembers the warmth of the stage lights on him, the elated feeling of the shows, the fact that after every taping his sides would hurt from the frantic laughter they shared.

He realises he hasn’t laughed that hard in months.

He crumbles the paper in his hands, throwing it away. It was too early to write, too painful, too filled with emotion. Someday he will though.

He wonders if he ever went beyond being that guy on the show, the Wayne with the vibrant smile, and almost hopes he hasn’t. He thinks they all secretly hope they haven’t, haven’t changed, haven’t lived any more after those couple years of perfection.

But they have.




mood: anxious